Toronto subway shooting leaves one person with life-threatening injuries, SIU called in

Witness account

I was coming from Hudson’s Bay and was heading to the subway northbound around 7.37 p.m. I walk towards the back of the platform and when the train arrives, which was a few minutes later, I enter the second last section of the train. I sat there for a couple of minutes while the train was idling and there was an announcement that the emergency button was pressed. I assumed that the train will resume service after 10 minutes so I stayed seated along with other bystanders. People sitting in front of me were staring at something behind me and then I saw a couple of policemen in yellow jackets pass by like they were looking for something. I turned my head, thinking it wasn’t something serious and then I hear the policemen scream “put your hands where I can see them” multiple times which caught everyone’s attention. I didn’t hear everything that the guy yelled back but I clearly heard him say “…. I don’t have anything to live for anyways.” I looked in the direction that they were looking at and saw this guy at the back of the train. Tall guy with a black jacket. That’s when everyone started getting out of the train and I saw that the policemen had their guns pointed at him.

We all (as in about 15-20 of us) slowly walk to the exit (Hudson’s Bay side) and met up with other people just waiting there. I heard from another bystander that he had a gun pointed at his own head. I also heard he was a young guy. We all wait in the middle of the exit thinking that the policemen had caught the guy but that’s when approximately 6-8 other policemen came. They started directing us to leave the platform and that’s when people all started heading towards the staircase that leads to the Hudson’s Bay underground bypass. At that time, I retrieved a transfer ticket (7:57 p.m.) and after 15 seconds, all of a sudden we all heard about 10-15 gun shots. That is when everyone started running up the stair case and escalators. People who were coming down were going back up, people were even running up the down escalators in which some got hurt from falling or were traumatized from the shots that they heard.

I left through the Bay and that’s when I took a picture of all the policemen outside.

Jessica Wong

A young man was critically injured and Downtown Toronto was thrown into disarray Friday night after a “police-involved shooting” on the platform of the Queen Street Subway.

Just after 8 p.m., reports emerged of multiple shots being fired in the lower levels of the downtown subway station. Only one victim was identified, and the investigation was quickly turned over to the Special Investigations Unit, an arm’s-length agency only called out in possible instances of police-involved injuries, deaths or sexual assaults.

Unconfirmed witness reports on Friday sketched a scene of a man entering a crowded subway with what appeared to be a weapon.

Jessica Wong, who said she was on the same train as the victim, described the chaotic scene in a Tweet. Police officers told the man to put up his hands where they could see them and ordered the other passengers off the train, she said.

The young man screamed, “I have nothing to live for anyways,” Ms. Wong said.

She said she heard 10 to 15 gunshots.

Neighbouring streets quickly swelled with police and emergency vehicles in the minutes after the incident, and all trains were halted between Union and Bloor stations, among the busiest stretches of the Toronto subway.

A crowd was milling around the station’s street entrance when the unidentified victim, wrapped in orange blankets, was wheeled out into a waiting ambulance and driven only a few metres away to St. Michael’s Hospital. As he was handed over to emergency room surgeons, the man’s condition was cited as “life-threatening.”

As of press time, Toronto Police were providing no additional details. “Special Investigations Unit has invoked mandate at Queen Street Subway,” read a Friday night message on the official Toronto Police Twitter account. “Police can’t comment by law.”

Queen Street Station is located at the busy intersection of Yonge and Queen, and connects directly to Toronto’s Eaton Centre, the site of a 2012 gang related shooting in which two people were killed.

Queen subway shooting some crazy kid screams"I have nothing to live for anyways" and multiple gun shots fired#toronto pic.twitter.com/Z9f0ML7yW4